Posts

In the past months, several apps like Secret or Whisper have appeared. These apps let you publish anonymously to friends in your circle or to the whole internet. Others, like SnapChat, let you send ephimerous photos and messages that vanish after 10 seconds of being opened by the receipient. Is this one of those inflection moments where a new trend is appearing? Because this apps are growing millions of users. And established players didn’t see them coming. Read more...

Good non-anecdotal analysis by Om Malik1 on how exceptional WhatsApp is that it is worth $19 billion to Mark Zuckerberg. Among other interesting data in the article, two interesting facts: WhatsApp has nearly 500M users after 4 years of founding. (It took Facebook 6 years to reach that point.) Monthly active users per employee at time of acquisition was 8 million users per employee, the most efficient in the market. (For example, Facebook has less than 500 thousand users per employee, and Snapchat less than 1. Read more...

Some people consider visibility crucial to their carrer. In this mindset, being visible at work is seen as highly important, and lacking visibility the direct path to career stagnation1. It’s not that you shouldn’t care about visibility. Maybe you are an introvert and your company culture is somewhat outdated and favors extrovers. And it is true that sometimes we hear that a candidate for a position is not ready to be promoted because she lacks visibility. Read more...

Clay Shirky writing about The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age. Shirky is always worth reading. The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn’t the increased supply of new technologies. It’s the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere. Those of us in the traditional academy could have a hand in shaping that future, but doing so will require us to relax our obsessive focus on elite students, institutions, and faculty. Read more...

Shane Parrish on making other’s opinions our own and skipping the thinking: It’s easy to take other’s opinions and make them our own. This isn’t hard. (…) We read but often we don’t digest. Reading involves effort; the more you put in the more you get out. The same applies to conversations. We are so busy thinking that we understand the other person that we start thinking about what we want to say before they’ve even made their point. Read more...